1 American Honey (Opens Friday, October 6) Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank,” “Wuthering Heights”) hits the highway to the West with a van full of rowdy kids, to gorgeous, bold, bawdy, dreamy effect.
2 Varieté (Film Studies Center, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 East 60th, Sunday, October 2) The Alloy Orchestra performs a live score to E.A. Dupont’s underrated trapeze-and-carnival Weimar waking nightmare. The film is a bracing DCP digital restoration that restores cuts made by American censors in 1925.
3 White Girl (Siskel, opens Friday, September 30) Comparisons to Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s “Kids” are not out of line for Elizabeth Wood’s Sundance-premiered nightmare-in-the-life slice-of-New York City sex-and-drugs-and-sex bacchanal.
4 Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil (Siskel, opens Friday, October 7) Five-hundred years after the death of the Dutch master, documentarian Pieter van Huystee searches out twenty-five surviving paintings and the work of archivists to attribute the work to the master of nightmares. It’s in the small details, you’d be correct to expect.
5 The Birth of A Nation (Opens Friday, October 7) Co-writer-director-producer-star Nate Parker’s Sundance sensation grows beyond its artistic intention to ignite conversation about a slave rebellion and its role in twenty-first century race relations, to the different question of trusting the artist beyond his work, as Parker’s own past comes under scrutiny.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
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